The Hawks and the Sparrows

                  

The Hawks and the Sparrows, from 1966, is Piero Pasolini's most affable and goofy picture. He thought it was his most fully realized film and his affection for rural Italy is palpable throughout. The movie is a road comedy featuring two innocents: an older man, played by Italian cinematic legend Toto, and his son played by Pasolini's then 17 year old boyfriend, Ninetto Davoli. Toto's placid theatricality is counterpointed with Davoli's amateurish enthusiasm. Aged repose is contrasted with youthful energy. There are enough silent comedy style yucks to assuage those put off by Pasolini's Marxist rhetoric and anti-papal jibes. The film is both a follow-up and an antidote to Pasolini's last film, The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. The reverence for Jesus displayed in that film is replaced by an irreverence for Catholic doctrine. 

Toto and Davoli are joined on their journey by a talking crow who later describes himself as a "leftist intellectual". The crow tells the fable of the hawks and sparrows that takes up the first half of the film. In it, Toto and Davoli play two medieval friars who are tasked by St. Francis to spread the word of God to our fair feathered friends. After much comic hardship and frivolity, the pair achieve a measure of success. However, they are shattered when they come upon a hawk preying upon a sparrow. St. Francis urges forbearance in their mission, but Pasolini's point is clear that, despite Christian bromides, man lives in a natural jungle where predation is second nature. Pasolini links these predations to contemporary capitalism in the second half and even has a restaging of Christ routing the merchants and moneylenders from the temple in the medieval section. Taking a dump in a field brings the ire of a local farmer in a sardonic segment that is akin to the populist Marxism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" in its mockery of private property.

The film ends with the duo, hungry and tired of the crow's endless harangues, endeavoring to consume the critter. A suitable ending to a film where, for once, Pasolini bears his thematic concerns lightly. One of the big plusses to the film is Ennio Morricone's lively score. The opening titles and credits are sung in mock epic style for comic effect. There are a number of sequences, however,  that feel shoehorned in, a cafe scene where tight trousered young men do the frug and footage of the funeral of Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti's funeral, but, on the whole, The Hawks and the Sparrows is a delight. However, the Italian public thought otherwise. This film had the worst box office showing of Toto's career. What does the public know, though, most of Toto's efforts were in wafer thin burlesques of popular films like Cleopatra and were not worthy of his talents. If you enjoy The Hawks and the Sparrows, I'm sure you will enjoy the short film Toto and Pasolini also collaborated on, The Earth Seen from the Moon which is part of the anthology film, The Witches .